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John Quinn at NEH Seminar

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John T. Quinn, assistant professor of classics at Hope College, has been selected
to participate in a Summer Seminar funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
that will be held at Columbia University in New York City.

The seminar, "Society and Culture in Roman Egypt," will run during June and July under the leadership of Professor Roger Bagnall of Columbia. The seminar's participants, numbering about a dozen, are college teachers of ancient history, ancient languages, the New Testament and Egyptology. The seminar will explore life in Egypt under the Roman Empire, from 31 BC to the end of the fifth century AD. Archaeology and literature will provide some of the materials for study, but most of the attention will center on papyrology, the study of ancient writing on paper made from papyrus. According to Quinn, Egypt's dry climate has ensured that many documents on paper, from personal letters to government memoranda, survived in ancient trash pits. An important goal of the seminar as a whole is to translate, and provide commentary on, the extant letters written by women in Roman Egypt. In addition, Quinn will be working on his own research project: locating papyrological evidence for the trade between Rome and Aksum, the ancient Ethiopian kingdom beyond, but allied to, the Roman Empire. Since Egypt lies on both trade routes to Aksum (the Red Sea and the Nile River), Quinn hopes to find mention of the trade in papyrus documents such as tax records and merchants' letters home to their families. The written evidence will, Quinn hopes, provide valuable details on the trade, which is well-attested by archaeological finds in both Egypt and Ethiopia. Quinn has been a member of the Hope faculty since 1995. He teaches Latin, as well as the two major languages of Roman Egypt: Greek and Coptic (Egyptian). He expects his work on Roman Egypt and Aksumite Ethiopia to become a part of his "Cultural Heritage" core curriculum course.

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13 Apr

John Quinn at NEH Seminar

John T. Quinn, assistant professor of classics at Hope College, has been selected to participate in a Summer Seminar funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that will be held at Columbia University in New York City.